I ditched corporate America in 1994 and started a management consulting and venture capital firm (http://petercohan.com). I started following stocks in 1981 when I was in grad school at MIT and started analyzing tech stocks as a guest on CNBC in 1998. I became a Forbes contributor in April 2011. My 11th book is "Hungry Start-up Strategy: Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision" (http://goo.gl/ygaUV). I also teach business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

Former Football Coach's DataStax Doubles

One of the oldest cliches in the book is that if you can win at team sports, you can win at business too. You don’t have to look much farther than the spectacular failure of former Red Sox pitcher Kurt Schilling’s 38 Studios to know that this truism is not always true.

But sometimes it is true. One such case is San Mateo, Calif.-based DataStax, “the company behind [open source database] ApacheApache Cassandra. We deliver the always on NoSQL database that allows you to have your data anywhere, everywhere, all the time — scaling to previously unimaginable levels,” claimed DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth in a January 2 interview.

And five lessons from this successful sports-star-led startup are worth heeding.

Bosworth is a football player from Pittsburgh who played on the University of Louisville football team while studying computer science and coached high school football for 13 years. He worked in the field as a developer and DBA, and then worked at Quest Software as a GM – forming a partnership with DataStax, and in May 2011 joined DataStax as CEO when it had 19 people.

DataStax has been growing fast since — having raised nearly $84 million in venture capital. Explained Bosworth, “After I became CEO, the company ended 2011 with 26 people; ended 2012 with 81; and we now have 195. My vision for DataStax was simple — you cannot build today’s applications on 25 year old technology from OracleOracle. We support an open source database, Cassandra, that has the scalability and availability that today’s applications required.”

DataStax has added customers at a rapid clip — and they are among the biggest and most complex enterprises in the world. “In 2011, we had around 20 customers and now we have over 300 — including NetFlix and eBay. Other customers don’t want to say they are using our product because they see it as a competitive advantage.” noted Bosworth.

DataStax is growing because it helps big companies run their operations without interruptions — even if their servers go down in a part of the world. Said Bosworth, “What we do is make sure that their service never goes down — even if a Hurricane Sandy knocks out a company’s servers, we keep the service running with barely a blip by shifting its operation to other data centers.”

DataStax makes money in a way that is common for open source companies — it sells an enterprise-strength version. According to Bosworth, “We are a strong supporter of the open source community. And we sell DataStax Enterprise which is a fully vetted and tested enterprise grade version of Cassandra with security, manageability, and mixed workload capacity. We charge customers a subscription fee based on the number of nodes per year that use the product.”

Here are the five ways that Bosworth has managed DataStax’s growth.

1. Teaming with the founders

Sometimes a startup’s cofounders have a great product idea and good sales person but they lack the skills needed to grow the company. Chances are that the startup would be better off if it could keep the founders and bring in a new CEO who has what it takes to scale the venture.

That’s what Bosworth did when he joined DataStax. As he said, “DataStax was founded in April 2010 and I arrived 13 months later. I had partnered with DataStax and after nine months they asked me to join as CEO. Matt Pfeil was the CEO and he loved working with customers while Jon Ellis was chief technology officer. Neither was interested in administrative and operational requirements so I came in to provide that. And I am happy to say that we are now partners in running the company.”

2. Proving the product concept

Once a CEO takes charge of a startup, it will only grow if it can convince a customer to use the product. That customer will only benefit the startup if the product delivers what I call a quantum value leap — e.g., it works better than anything else on the market and its price is right. If that customer then refers the startup to others, then its growth trajectory can begin.

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